Was He the Eggman?

THE story of eggs Benedict is a hard one to tell. The beginning is shady at best, the main character has a hangover, and there are decades when nothing much happens. But the genre is certain, and the setting clear: Eggs Benedict is a mystery rooted in a long-vanished version of New York. Despite the dish’s twisted history, it provides a link to one of the city’s more glamorous eras.

Of eggs Benedict’s origins, much has been said, but little has been settled. Key witnesses are long dead. One cookbook contradicts another. Even the Oxford English Dictionary shrugs: “Origins U.S.” What remains is a recipe that for about a century has come to represent something greater than the sum of its ingredients.

The dish — poached eggs and Canadian bacon on an English muffin, all topped with hollandaise sauce — remains a brunch staple in the city’s most luxurious restaurants, and far beyond, prepared by the most accomplished chefs, keeping the distinguished company of the bloody mary and the mimosa.

And while there are several eggs Benedict creation myths, some of which may be the subject of discussion among aficionados on National Eggs Benedict Day, a little-known observance celebrated on April 16, they share decidedly genteel roots: rich and distinguished New Yorkers, fabulous New York restaurants and an adventurous 19th-century dining culture unfettered by contemporary concerns about trans fats and cholesterol.

If there is a starting point to the debate over the provenance of this quintessential brunch dish, it would be 1942. That was the year The New Yorker published an article about a stockbroker named Lemuel Benedict and a breakfast order he had placed nearly 50 years earlier, in 1894, at the old Waldorf Hotel at Fifth Avenue and 33rd Street. By 1931, when the hotel, renamed the Waldorf-Astoria, moved to its current location on Park Avenue, eggs Benedict had been enshrined as a classic American dish and a fixture in a hotel that served presidents, movie stars and foreign dignitaries.

By all accounts, Lemuel Benedict was a dashing ladies’ man, typically outfitted in fine dark suits and high white collars. The New York Stock Exchange archive has a caricature depicting him as a slick purveyor of Wall Street gossip. His name appeared often in newspaper society columns, and he had a reputation for leaving huge tips in New York’s finest restaurants.When attending football games at Princeton, where his nephew Coleman Benedict was a student, “Uncle Lem” drew attention by donning a raccoon-skin coat and carrying a cane that contained a liquor flask.

Understandably, Lemuel’s flamboyant man-about-town persona alienated him from the rest of the aristocratic and reserved Benedict family. In 1908, when he married Carrie Bridewell, a New York opera singer who was one of the first American-born women to sing at the Metropolitan Opera House, his family objected on the grounds that his new wife worked for a living.

Although Lemuel Benedict had a hangover that morning in 1894, the New Yorker article recounted, he didn’t shy away from breakfast. He ordered two poached eggs, bacon, buttered toast and a pitcher of hollandaise sauce, a rich, egg-based sauce flavored with butter, lemon and vinegar. Then he built the dish that bears his name.

Lemuel’s innovation attracted the attention of Oscar of the Waldorf, as the maître d’hôtel there was widely known. He promptly tested it and put the item on the menu, although Oscar’s version substituted ham for bacon and an English muffin for toast.

After that history-making morning, Lemuel Benedict reveled in the attention and prestige that resulted from his breakfast order. But his original request had specified toast, and he never warmed to the idea of English muffins.

“Lemmy would be upset if they made it other than the way he first ordered it,” Ethyle Wolfe Benedict, his nephew’s widow, said last month. “Or if the hollandaise wasn’t just right.”

Benedict, Benedick

Lemuel Benedict died at age 76 in 1943, less than a year after the New Yorker article was published. The article had, however, caught the attention of Jack Benedict, a real estate salesman from Colorado who was the son of Lemuel’s first cousin. As other stories about the creation of eggs Benedict surfaced, Jack Benedict’s interest in the dish grew into full-fledged activism and, eventually, obsession. He became dedicated to the task of making sure that his dead relative got credit for his famous breakfast order.

Jack Benedict was particularly upset by an article published in March 1978 in Bon Appetit magazine titled “Perfect Eggs Benedict,” which credited a Mr. and Mrs. LeGrand Benedict as the founders of the dish.

According to Bon Appetit, the couple requested the ingredients one morning around the turn of the last century at Delmonico’s, the financial district restaurant famous for its eponymous steaks and heavy-hitter clientele; apparently the couple, who were regular Delmonico’s patrons, were bored with the menu. The article noted that one account credited the dish’s creation to a young man with a hangover at the Waldorf, but in an error that must have further inflamed Jack Benedict, it referred to the young man not as Lemuel Benedict but as Samuel.

Photo

Lemuel Benedict in a caricature.

And in 1894, the year Lemuel placed his order at the Waldorf, the legendary Delmonico’s chef Charles Ranhofer published a huge cookbook called “The Epicurean” that included an almost identical recipe, Eggs a la Benedick.

The LeGrand version of the eggs Benedict creation story came to eclipse the account offered in The New Yorker in many cookbooks and food reference books. It also prompted Jack Benedict to begin a campaign to reinstate the Lemuel Benedict version.

“As long as the delectable dish is enjoyed by an increasing number of persons,” he wrote to Bon Appetit after its article appeared, “I don’t suppose it really matters to whom is given credit for its innovation. But to set the record straight, it all began in New York City, at the old Waldorf Hotel, in 1894.”

By coincidence, the Bon Appetit article appeared just as Jack Benedict was poised to realize a long-held dream of starting a restaurant. In August 1978, he opened L. C. Benedict Restaurant and Tavern, in Winter Park, a ski resort near Denver. The initials in the restaurant’s name stood for the venerated relative’s first two names, Lemuel Coleman.

Jack Benedict’s purposes at the restaurant were culinary but also historical; by offering both Eggs Benedict Lemuel’s Way (with toast and bacon) and Eggs Benedict Oscar’s Way (with an English muffin and Canadian bacon), he hoped to educate his customers about the origins of the dish.

Having collected as much material as he could find on eggs Benedict, he installed a storyboard near the restaurant’s entrance that traced the complex history of eggs Benedict from Lemuel’s initial order up to the present. By discrediting the opposition, he hoped to restore his cousin’s claim to culinary immortality.

At this point, the tale moved to New York, to the Chelsea apartment of Lemuel’s nephew Coleman, a classics professor at Columbia University who grew up in his uncle’s care, and his wife, Ethyle, a classics professor and provost at Brooklyn College. The couple’s apartment is decorated with elaborate tea sets, a collection of silver spoons encased in glass and a Benedict family sofa dating to 1830.

One day in the late 1980s, Coleman Benedict announced to his wife: “Some nut has been pestering me. He says he’s my cousin. He wants to know about Uncle Lemmy.”

The caller, of course, was Jack Benedict. The couple had never heard of him and had no real way — or even a desire — to verify his claim that he was a relative. For all they knew, the man was an impostor eager to cash in on the family name.

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After that initial phone call, however, Jack Benedict’s enthusiasm only grew. “He wouldn’t let go of us,” Ms. Benedict said. A deluge of phone calls and letters followed, as Jack began to forge a bond with the couple, despite the fact that they did not share his passionate interest in eggs Benedict.

Jack was thrilled not only to have connected with his newfound relatives, but to learn that they were historians. He informed them that he had begun work on what he hoped would be the definitive article on eggs Benedict, and hoped that the couple, with their editorial experience, could help.

His jovial sincerity — his letters simultaneously begged for their help and apologized for boring them — overcame their initial skepticism, to the extent that they stopped referring to him as “Crazy Cousin Jack.” His letters kept coming, written on stationery engraved with the words “The family that gave the world eggs Benedict.” He sent along every article he could find mentioning the dish, filling the margins with responses and lamenting instances in which credit was given to anyone but the person he deemed the dish’s one true inventor.

In 1988, a decade after Jack Benedict took up the cause, Ethyle and Coleman Benedict found themselves in Denver, where Ms. Benedict was to give a lecture. The couple agreed to meet Jack Benedict at his home in nearby Littleton, where he hoped to enlist them as allies in his campaign to settle the eggs Benedict question once and for all.

When the couple arrived at Jack’s home, Ms. Benedict recalled, he hugged Coleman and exclaimed, “ ‘You look just like my father!’ ” The couple were still unsure about Jack Benedict’s claim that he was their relative. But on arriving at his house, Ms. Benedict noticed that the family photographs on the walls were the same as those that hung in the couple’s New York apartment. The man might be a character, she concluded, but he didn’t seem to be a liar. And his interest in eggs Benedict seemed genuine enough.

Family photographs were only the beginning. One room was filled with eggs Benedict memorabilia: menus, photographs, restaurant signs. “His house was a shrine,” Ms. Benedict said. “We spent that day going through everything on the walls.”

Photo

Ethyle BenedictCredit
Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times

As it turned out, Jack’s culinary venture, L. C. Benedict Restaurant and Tavern, had closed its doors in 1984 after six years in business. The eggs Benedict memorabilia that now furnished his home had once decorated the restaurant that had been his dream.

The next morning, Jack joined the couple for breakfast at their hotel. Nobody ordered eggs Benedict. Ms. Benedict, for one, doesn’t particularly care for the dish. Her husband, after a lifetime of hearing about it, was sick of brunch-related celebrations of his family name. And Jack, though a tireless advocate for the cause, had inherited Lemuel’s pickiness. “He thought nobody made it authentically,” Ms. Benedict said.

After that meeting, Jack wrote to his relatives, “Thank you for coming to the house for an historical visit.” The experience had revitalized his writing efforts, he added, and he looked forward to their editorial guidance.

Still, it was an overwhelming task, and one that Jack, then 64 and suffering from emphysema, was not sure he would live to see to completion. He continued to send the couple letters brimming with passion, but they were laced with frustration; the Bon Appetit article had done insufferable damage to his cause. “The facts are that people did read Bon Appetit in 1978,” he conceded, “and LeGrand is winning, not Lemuel.”

Jack continued to explore different ways of telling Lemuel’s story. He sent a detailed business proposal to McDonald’s suggesting a breakfast sandwich called Eggs McBenedict, and he designed an intricate place mat featuring an image of Lemuel and the story of his Waldorf order. He was too late; the Egg McMuffin, which helped McDonald’s introduce its breakfast menu in the mid-1970s, had already taken eggs Benedict as its model. Dejected but determined, Jack Benedict continued work on his article and kept up his correspondence with his relatives. Fifteen magazines had rejected him.

“The funny thing is, it’s pointless and a waste of almost two years’ time unless the true story is finally published,” he wrote to the couple. “I think it will be, however, which is why I keep on with my thinking and writing.”

No Word From Oscar

One seeming hitch in the version that credits Lemuel Benedict is that Oscar of the Waldorf, who plays such a key role in that account, never confirmed the story, despite ample opportunity to do so. Oscar had no aversion to publicity; in his biography, “Oscar of the Waldorf,” published in 1943 by Karl Schriftgiesser, and in magazine articles that Oscar wrote, he notes that his creations include the Waldorf salad and Thousand Island dressing.

But Oscar never mentions eggs Benedict, either by name or by description. In 1947, three years before he died, Oscar wrote an introduction to “The Gold Cook Book,” written by a chef named Louis Pullig DeGouy. The cookbook includes a recipe for eggs Benedict, but neither the introduction nor the recipe itself mentions any connection to Oscar.

“It’s not a 100 percent invented dish,” said Gerald Gliber, a culinary expert at the Art Institute of New York City, formerly the New York Restaurant School. “It’s an evolution, not a creation.” That a dish called eggs Benedict took New York restaurants by storm a long time ago, Mr. Gliber added, doesn’t necessarily mean the dish was anything new.

Even the American Egg Board, the promotional arm of the egg industry, is not sure where the dish originated.

“Food history is so muddy,” said Linda Braun, the board’s consumer services director. “It’s kind of like that telephone game, with somebody whispering in someone else’s ear.” Nevertheless, Ms. Braun’s organization endorses the version that credits Lemuel with the invention of the dish. As for the rival claims of the Waldorf and Delmonico’s, Ms. Braun offered a conciliatory theory.

“What if we’re talking about the same person, and he simply got his two favorite chefs to make him his own special dish?” she suggested. “Couldn’t he have walked into two different places with the same request?”

A Question of Dignity

When Lemuel Benedict died, the paid death notice in The New York Times cited his membership in the New York Stock Exchange but made no mention of a culinary legacy. His survivors hadn’t forgotten. They were simply ashamed.

“It was undignified,” explained Ms. Benedict, who at 88 has become the family’s unofficial historian and the sole surviving teller of the eggs Benedict tale. “It’s all in the context of an aristocratic family.” To talk about breakfast, let alone the hangover, in the same breath as a career on the stock exchange would have been an embarrassing misrepresentation of Lemuel’s genteel roots.

Such an explanation would not have satisfied Jack Benedict, who died in 1993 at age 69 without publishing his article. But one publication did give Lemuel the posthumous credit his cousin Jack always dreamed he would get.

When Coleman Benedict died in 2005, his widow had a decision to make. Though she is sure her husband would not have approved, she included, high in a paid death notice published in The Times, a mention of his relation to Lemuel Benedict, who, as the notice put it, “is incidentally renowned as the eponymous creator of ‘Eggs Benedict’ for his breakfast order at the Waldorf Hotel in 1894,” which Oscar of the Waldorf “prepared at his request, and named in his honor.”